Claire Conger

Sitting in the movie theater, waiting for Woody Allen’s Vicky Christina Barcelona
to start, I talked to my date about the meaning of marriage. I asked what was the point unless you let your minds meld, unless you allow your mate to influence not only what you think, but how you think. That’s a very exciting and dangerous thing to do. It requires that you trust your mate’s mind. It’s a romantic notion.

My date proceeded to enumerate the “good” marriages he knows, marriages in which minds remain decidedly separate. He doubt he comes close to understanding what I mean.

I usually like Woody Allen movies and Vicky Christina Barcelona is no exception.

The pivotal character, Spanish artist Juan Antonio Gonzalo, is entwined with his ex-wife, Maria Elena, in a melding of the minds. Maria Elena shows him how to see and so he “steels” her vision, her style, her being. They struggle with this mind-meld and their struggle becomes mercurial. Juan Antonio concludes that love is ephemeral. He lies to himself, as the viewer can see when he becomes fluid under the touch of Maria Elena while with Christina he’s stiff and mechanical—in a word, American.

Vicky Christina Barcelona follows two young American women, Vicky and Christina, embarking on life with two very different views on relationships. Juan Antonio enters their story and spins them around.

Vicky, entering into a “good” marriage, suddenly finds her new husband’s discussion about material acquisition stultifying and his “I’m not judging” judgments about Christina ridiculous. Her own view of Christina changes from considering her rash to considering her courageous. There will be no melding of minds between Vicky and her husband.

Director Allen starts us off thinking that Christina is searching for love and that her impetuous nature will get her into trouble. She finds what she wants for her life as Juan Antonio’s muse, or so she thinks, but with the return of Maria Elena, she realizes that she is wholly inadequate—she does not inspire Juan Antonio’s art, she is merely a diversion. What she wants, it turns out, is to express her inner being, to be an artist herself.

Vicky Christina Barcelona is all about courage in seizing life, finding your place on that continuum between rational safety and excited passion. It’s about the impossibility of finding, getting, and keeping what you want. It’s about that point on the continuum being transient and your dreams being evanescent.

I’ll have to hand it to my date. He wanted the same ending I wanted, that those American girls stay in Barcelona. There may be a bit of the romantic in him after all.